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THERE WERE OTHER ONES?
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The Red Winged Blackbird is a bird found in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Their striking red plumage against black feathers is sure to make them stand out. They’re actually known to be very polyamorous, with a male having more than one female nesting in his territory at a time. There is actually a red winged black bird that does not have the yellow stripe, although they are not a different species and rather a product of the environment that they live in. Learn More!
Cute, sweet, the Long Tailed Tit is an adorable little bird. They are also very social, with nest helpers that help with the feeding of chicks. Often, these helpers are related to the parents, or have lost their own nest and chicks. They can have up to 12 chicks at once so the extra help is very much appreciated! Learn More!
(Red Winged Blackbird photo by Jonathan Eckerson)
(Long Tailed Tit photo by Ivan Sjögren)
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A menace of the skies, the Herring Gull lies in wait as you eat delicious fries… only to snatch it right out of your hands. A scavenger that has highly adapted to the presence of us humans, the Herring Gull is resourceful. They even have special glands above their eyes to extract salt from salt water, allowing them to drink sea water when fresh water is scarce. They will also pant to cool off. Learn More!
The Green Heron has been shown to bait the water, waiting for a tastey fish to swim up. They will use bread, feathers, and insects to entice their meal to the surface. Then, they strike! Although they usually hunt on the shores, sometimes a heron will dive into the water to catch deeper prey! Learn More!
(Herring Gull photo by Gates DuPont)
(Green Heron photo by Marky Mutchler)
History isn't written by the victors it's written by the guys who write stuff down
Ultimately the "barbarian" tribes won against Western Rome but Germanic and Scandinavian and West Asian peoples didn't do much writing outside of labeling stuff and legal records at that time so what did they think about the fall of Rome? We can guess. We can use logic to figure out a lot of that stuff. Ultimately though, the Romans were the guys who wrote histories.
Plenty of indigenous people won battles against European colonizers during the so-called age of exploration but the Europeans for the most part were the ones with newspapers.
Ramses ii lost the Battle of Kadesh big time but he had an army of artists to help him create propaganda about it and people just don't pay as much attention to the Hittites as they do the Egyptians so the battle is still mostly remembered all these thousands of years later from his perspective.
Often times the victors are the ones that are left to write down what happened. That's not necessarily always the case though. Your overall historical impact is often more dependent upon your ability to create propaganda. See how both Americans and Canadians will still argue over which one of them won the war of 1812 when overall the war was a draw. Both just grew up with different narratives being fed to them by their respective school systems.
History is written by people that write history. Especially if nobody in your culture writes or creates physical propaganda, like at all, it doesn't matter how many things you accomplish. If your enemies are out there making monuments their story is the version of events that will be more likely to stand the test of time.
Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, but Athens was way more likely to write stuff down and Athens grew up to be the biggest city in Greece. So they wrote the history of the war. Literally.
Fair point but I want to mention the Maya codices. The written form of the Mayan language is a glyph system that was used primary to preserve lineages and histories of royal and noble houses and individuals.
In the modern day, we know these (fractured) histories primarily through carved stone stelae and painted ceramic vessels.
I say fractured because during the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, codices were burned en masse by the thousands most notably at the order of Diego de Landa. Today only three plus a fragment of a fourth are known to survive.
It doesn’t matter if you write things down or not. If somebody fucks your society’s shit up enough they absolutely can control and will the narrative.
That is also true. But my main point was that saying “history is written by the winners” as a blanket statement doesn’t really work. Often times yes the winners write down things, destroy things, etc. but this isn’t a universal truth and I think it’s important to acknowledge that. The survival of information and who controls the narrative in the long run is a really complicated topic.
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
~ G.K. Chesterton, writing the original lines, in Tremendous Trifles, Book XVII: The Red Angel (1909)
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One of the great popular novelists of the early part of this century was G.K. Chesterton. Writing at a time when fairy tales were under attack for pretty much the same reason as books can now be covertly banned in some schools because they have the word ‘witch’ in the title, he said: “The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.”
~ Terry Pratchett — getting the spirit of it right, but technically misquoting Chesterton — in When the Children Read Fantasy, published in SF2 Concatenation (1994)
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“Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” - G.K. Chesterton, writer
~ Neil Gaiman (neil-gaiman) — getting the spirit of it right, but technically misquoting Chesterton — in Coraline (2002)
As Gaiman explains:
It’s my fault. When I started writing Coraline, I wrote my version of the quote [from] Tremendous Trifles, meaning to go back later and find the actual quote, as I didn’t own the book, and this was before the Internet. And then ten years went by before I finished the book, and in the meantime I had completely forgotten that the Chesterton quote was mine and not his.
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G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist. Children already know the dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
~ Andi Bushell — getting the spirit of it right, but technically misquoting Chesterton — in Criminal Minds; Season 3, Episode 5, Seven Seconds (October 24th, 2007)
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I love that the pandemic actually definitively proved a lot of those "hard" questions for us. Masking up reduced cases of the flu to almost nonexistent numbers and we had zero flu deaths for a time. The welfare and social service and unemployment programs helped keep people living paycheck to paycheck out of poverty, and those stimulus checks some folks keep complaining about actually massively benefitted the common man and the economy. Individual personal travel was so extremely restricted on a global scale that we basically have concrete proof that individual restraint in terms of driving cars or travelling means absolutely nothing by comparison because the mass pollution is coming from the fisheries and the corporations with private jets and container ships. Working from home actually has massive benefits for a company like productivity boosts and better mental health of employees while also saving gas
and we're just. Willingly going back to how everything was before. We were shown how to do things better and the people in charge said "that's nice but we just want to get everything 'back to normal' :)"
we’re not willingly going back to how everything was before. we are being forced back into it by members of the ruling class who found out that making things better for almost everyone else made them feel bad.
Reblog this if you pronounce “.gif” as “GIF.”
NOT JIF,
GIF.
And here is the link for the opposite.
WE SHALL SEE WHICH ONE PREVAILS.
they should make those tourism websites for cities but instead its for things to do when you live there your entire life. What do i do lol
I actually have some good tips!
1. Actual tourist guides can be super informative. Sounds stupid but it does work. There's a ton of stuff I only saw because I Googled "hidden gems in [my city]"
2. I often check my local museum for temporary exhibitions, it's always something new to see!
3. I also love to check my library page for events. There's a ton of cool events like workshops and author meetings.
4. I try to go even 20km outside where I live. It always feels new!
5. If you have a local newspaper/webpage it's an amazing source of info what to do /where to go.
I hope some of these tips work out for you c: Because they legit made my life better and it's a pretty cheap way to have a great time. Good luck!